"War can protect; it cannot create."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Alfred North Whitehead quotes (page 13 of 17)
326 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter."
Read quote
3 likes
"Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity."
Read quote
3 likes
"Do not teach too many subjects and what you teach, teach thoroughly."
Read quote
3 likes
"In a living civilization there is always an element of unrest, for sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilized order survives on its merits and is transformed by its power of recognizing its imperfections."
Read quote
3 likes
"The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality."
Read quote
3 likes
"Governments are best classified by considering who are the 'somebodies' they are in fact endeavouring to satisfy."
Read quote
3 likes
"The importance of an individual thinker owes something to chance. For it depends upon the fate of his ideas in the minds of his successors."
Read quote
3 likes
"Democracy...is a society in which the unbeliever feels undisturbed and at home. If there were only a half dozen unbelievers in America, their well-being would be a test of our democracy."
Read quote
3 likes
"There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit."
Read quote
3 likes
"The fixed person for the fixed duties who in older societies was such a godsend, in future will be a public danger."
Read quote
3 likes
"Each generation criticizes the unconscious assumptions made by its parent. It may assent to them, but it brings them out in the open."
Read quote
3 likes
"There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition."
Read quote
3 likes
"Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder."
Read quote
3 likes
"As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death."
Read quote
3 likes
""One and one make two" assumes that the changes in the shift of circumstance are unimportant. But it is impossible for us to analyze this notion of unimportant change."
Read quote
3 likes
"Algebra reverses the relative importance of the factors in ordinary language. It is essentially a written language, and it endeavors to exemplify in its written structures the patterns which it is its purpose to convey. The pattern of the marks on paper is a particular instance of the pattern to be conveyed to thought. The algebraic method is our best approach to the expression of necessity, by reason of its reduction of accident to the ghostlike character of the real variable."
Read quote
3 likes
"The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts... Seek simplicity and distrust it."
Read quote
3 likes
"The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts. All the world over and at all times there have been practical men, absorbed in 'irreducible and stubborn facts'; all the world over and at all times there have been men of philosophic temperament, who have been absorbed in the weaving of general principles. It is this union of passionate interest in the detailed facts with equal devotion to abstract generalisation which forms the novelty of our present society."
Read quote
3 likes
"Many a scientist has patiently designed experiments for the purpose of substantiating his belief that animal operations are motivated by no purposes. He has perhaps spent his spare time in writing articles to prove that human beings are as other animals so that 'purpose' is a category irrelevant for the explanation of their bodily activities, his own activities included. Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study."
Read quote
3 likes